#10: American Gladiators (1991, NES)

American Gladiators sucks (this game, not the wonderful show, of course). It's pretty much a perfect storm of bad graphics, terrible control, terrible design, and unbalanced difficulty. An American Gladiators game should be pretty easy to pull off. I would expect some 2-player alternating game built around some minigames inspired by events in the show. Such a game has been pulled off 'successfully' many times, like with Nickelodeon GUTS which, while far from good, at least wasn't this broken (well, it sort of was).

The whole structure is goofy - for being based on a competition show, there is very little competition here. Just a series of events set up like stages - imagine a basketball game where the score is kept, but instead you proceed to another court after every made basket. If you somehow manage to complete the game, you get a quick congratulations, then are sent off to repeat everything again on a harder difficulty. I could extend some sort of break on account of the NES being pretty rudimentary from a hardware perspective, but Tecmo managed to fit stat tracking and a 16 game NFL schedule into Tecmo Super Bowl around the same time and on the same hardware - the American Gladiator developers (all 4 of them) just didn't seem to care (not that I would blame them).

We haven't even touched on the gameplay, which can be pretty well summarized as broken. That may be slightly harsh, many of these games are functional, after all, but I have a hard time spotting where in them any sense of pleasure may be derived. Human Canonball is built exclusively on timing without giving the player opportunity to learn from his mistakes (short of dying and starting over) - bad design. The Wall is ludicrously unbalanced, expecting the player to navigate a maze while hitting a & b as fast as possible, but never so fast to be more than half as fast as the scores of gladiators swarming around you. Joust seems to do whatever it wants regardless of what buttons you press, provided you do so fast enough. Assault could have been ok, but like with most of the other events you are made to repeat the same act over and over, progressively harder, until you can't actually complete it (and it isn't fun). Why not use the more difficult mode unlocked on completing the game to unleash such horrors? Powerball is probably the closest things get to decent, owing mostly to it being the only event where you can't die, thus providing the means to learn and adapt to the everything going on. The Eliminator I've never seen, but I'm sure it sucks too.



Everything is built on the idea that the best way to extend game length is to make the player do everything in successively harder waves, which I thought had gone out of fashion by the time the Legend of Zelda came out, not something I would expect to see in a NES game released early in the 16-bit era. Granted, I'm maybe being a bit too hard on it, but seeing as it was my first exposure to a truly crappy game as a child, it's always held a special spot of contempt in my heart.

American Gladiators
Publisher: GameTek
Developer: Incredible Technologies
Released: October 1991
Obtained: Sometime from 1991-1992

2.5/10